It is one of the great ironies of American life to me that so many people dream of having a farm while our entire system of work, transportation, politics, lobbying, government regulation, agriculture, the environment and economics work to make farming difficult or impossible for all but corporate farms. Family farms – once the backbone of American farming – are vanishing in unprecedented numbers. Wendell Berry argues that our economists and politicians have ruled farms too inefficient for real farmers, they only work for people who love farms but don’t really farm – this would be people like me. Our policies are ruining the land as well as farmers and their families.

I know a lot of farmers know, many are my friends. They are pleased that I can make my farm work and keep it as a farm, however I do it.  I tell the farmers I meet that I do work my farm, my crop is stories and I grow them here. Some years, it is a good crop, sometimes I feel the policies of the world are set against me, and I am drowning in a sea of change,  just like a real farmer might feel. I think we dream of farms because they evoke so many good and simple things that many of us do or have missed in our lives – a connection to nature, to animals, to peace and quiet, to the rituals of the seasons, the rhythms of the land, the beauty of the world. There is something timeless about a farm, something that is fixed, places of connection in a world of disconnection. If you own a farm, you are close to nature in the most elemental way. If you own a farm with animals, you reconnect to them as well, a powerful, necessary and healing part of the human experience for me. Just as photography draws me to understand and seek out light, a farm draws me to watch the clouds, care about the weather, study the land.

Every person with a farm is an animal advocate and an environmentalist in one way or another, it literally comes with the territory. The seasons really mean something, in the Spring we instantly begin preparing for winter, in the winter we are plotting our hay and wondering about summer. Our lives are bounded by the chores that never end and are never completed. Every day, a broken fence, some rotten barnboard, a broken lawnmower, a heated tank that isn’t warm, snakes in the barn, a hive in a bad place, an animal with a limp, a gate that suddenly won’t close,  feces, manure and waste move around. Real farmers fix most of these things themselves, they are every busy, they are never done. Sometimes we need help to fix these things, more and more we can do it ourselves.

A farm was never a dream for me, at least not a conscious one,  I never thought of living on one until I drove past Bedlam Farm and fell in love and it changed my life, more than any dog or donkey. I suppose it must have been some kind of dream for me or I wouldn’t have bought the farm on the spot without even seeing it. It is still possible. There are lots of farms on the market looking for people to love them, just as there are so many dogs in shelters  waiting for a home.

From the first day on my farm, I knew I had come home and had to stay. It was exhilarating, beyond anything I have ever known. The farm taught me so many things about the world – about money, animals, fences, hay, water, drainage – including a grave sense of responsibility that has never left me. I left my life and found it there.  If you live on a farm, it is the Mother and the Father, you never stop worrying about it, caring for it, thinking of it. It gets into your head, your bones, your smell and all over your shoes, it tracks all kinds of stuff into your house. Animals bear watching, they cannot be forgotten. It is not a perfect life to be on a farm, any more than moving to another place will fulfill all of your dreams. Life is life, wherever you are, and a perfect life is not for human beings, it is not for me, it would be an empty and meaningless life.

But the farm reminds us of simpler times, of shared values, of independence, ritual and coherence. Farmers are a community, whatever their motives, they share a language and an understanding. The truth about farm dreams is this, I think. Farms speak to something old and deep inside of us, when we are called to them, we go. If we are meant to be on one, we cannot resist the call. I suppose I was always looking for love, and I found it on a farm, along with many other things. It was the destination of my hero journey, the place I was seeking and was meant to find, the last and final stop on my long search for a fulfilling life.

I never set foot on a farm until I  bought Bedlam Farm, it is an enduring wish that I will die on this one. It is a dream.

Why are farm dreams so powerful even as the farms that inspire them are vanishing? Because farms are part of our cultural and social history, they are woven into our subconscious, they are still more natural to many of us than the clogged and overpowering cities and suburbs where most Americans now live. Everything has its time and place, but no matter how many farms shut down or are gobbled up by corporate power, farm dreams live and endure. I imagine they always will.